While the winter meetings begin in earnest today, the Red Sox have already acquired the best person available this off-season: Hank Steinbrenner. Did he really grow up watching the Yankees from 1973 to the present? If so, how do you explain the inanity of the following comment about the Twins and the Johan Santana trade talks?

“I’m not going to be played against the Red Sox. That’s not something I’ll do. That’s not something the Yankees should ever do, and that’s I think what they’re trying to do now.”

Wow, somebody’s cracking under the stress, huh? Understandable, I guess, when you’ve been running the team for, what, a couple months? But really, “I’m not going to be played against the Red Sox”? What baseball planet is he living on? He sounds like a wimp scared of taking his gym shorts off in the locker room. Might not measure up, Hank?

Hank Steinbrenner is out of his league in running the Yankees. He’s the reason this country has an inheritance tax. In fact, he’s an advertisement for raising the tax to about 75 percent, which might allow the Yankees to be controlled by someone other than a Steinbrenner going forward. If I’m a Yankee fan, I want someone else in charge. If I’m a Sox fan (and I am), then I love Hank Steinbrenner. In the space of two months, he’s insulted Joe Torre with a one-year, incentive-laden contract, just because the team didn’t have the huevos to fire him outright; he had to eat crow over A-Rod, whom he said was done playing in New York if he opted out; and he’s insulted Posada and Rivera in public by saying their contract offers were the best they were gonna get. Now he’s whining because he might be left standing when the music stops around the Santana table. Consequently, he’s now setting …dun, dun, dun – an imaginary deadline.

“We’ll see how it goes, but this is not an act. It’s not a bluff. It’s just reality,” he said. “Because as much as I want Santana, and you can make that clear — for his sake, to know that I do want him — but the fact is that I’m not going to play the game. We’ve made them the best offer. And at this point, it’s not going to get any better. So they can decide. At this point, it’s up to them. I don’t think they want to lose us in this thing, obviously. Nobody wants to lose the Yankees in a negotiation.”

Not going to play the game, huh? Yeah, OK. Well, he’s right about one thing – nobody wants to lose the Yankees in a negotiation. But since he’s already proven (with the A-Rod discussions) that the Yankees’ word is on par with Nick Saban’s, no one really believes the Bronx Bombers will simply walk away from the negotiating table.

Hank, go rent “Rounders.” You need a crash course in how to play poker.

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